On the picture 2R2URF8F.jpg i think its very obvious that the pillars are all textured the exact same way, i think a litte uv-change for each one can make this scenery more convincing.
Also the boat shot, seems like there is a little less fog now, thats good, the fog in the teaser seemed to take away too much depth and detail of the scene.
The Thom and robot shot looks really good already, but the compositing cant totally convince yet. (Are there plans to modify the before-breakup-amsterdam like in the storyboard?)

Amsterdam has looked pretty much the same for a very long time. The only thing that changes in the time scale of decades is the people and their transportation. Perhaps the team could do some relatively simple things, like adding stuff in the sky (aircraft, floating advertisement
screens, etc.). All very much in the background, so that it doesn’t need a lot of detail to achieve the desired effect.

It looks like the background on the right hand side of the frame is frozen until the robot hand releases. The transition from frozen bg to movement is sort of subconsciously noticeable as it looks like it rotates a degree or so. Probably not noticeable in the continuity of the film but when you post clips up here it’s easy to play them 20 times in a row blown up large looking for “flaws” Keep up the good work and take crits with grains of salt.

It took me a while, but I finally see what you mean. I think Sebastian didn’t roto this part, but did a 3d track, built the railing of the bridge in 3d and then textured it with the original. It could therefore indeed be that that track wasn’t completely stable.

The interaction of the robot and thom looks really good. i saw the image of the actor being fixed between to brooms..things..and didn’t imagine that it would have such an important impact on this shot :)

One of the main issues I see is that in cycles is very difficult to get realistic metallic results, you need to combine several nodes but even like that you don’t get same quality than other engines when handles metallic looks, like in Octane for example, you can set up a metallic material very quickly, very easy and almost all the time looks good enough.

Well ! Admitedly the nkdata support which was present at first in cycle roadmap desappear and no news about it (you may ask Brecht) but it also the spirit of cycle and compare to a carepaint shader (with all option) which is really difficult to do, a metalic shader only need a diffuse and a glossy with a fresnel (and perhaps a color ramp and a gamma to adjust the falloff but its all) ! And since cycle isnt a spectral renderer, nkdata may not work so !

My main gripe is that the actor doesn’t casue any reflections on the robot at all. Even just a simple textured non-animated mannequin would probably be convincing enough, but especially the reflections on the robot’s hand as he lets go is very noticeable.

Overall, the work you guys are doing is just fantastic. There is something about the video that bugs me, though, and most animators do this. When machines stop moving, they stop moving. They don’t shift in place like humans or animals do. They only sway to correct their balance and then rest until they are again out of balance. Animating robots/machines as if they were humans makes them look much lighter than they are and it makes them less believable, less menacing. That robot would be much too heavy in real life to sway the way is does in the animation.